The Brightness of the Fens, Entry 4

[goatgodschild]

This is a big post, and I think I should get through some background and overview before it can properly start. 

The Long Bright Dark is one of the most low-key horny shows I’ve ever seen, in a way that I can only describe as “1970’s”.

 

This was, admittedly, during the “T&A Guy” era of HBO, where all of their shows had a required amount of (female) nudity that needed to show up on screen. TLBD plays with this, in the sense that while the Network Mandated Boobs scenes show up, the sex scenes are all unpleasant for one reason or another:

There are Marty’s manipulative and hypocritical affairs (always colored with the threat of police violence), Rust’s dubcon encounter, and the swamp cultist incest scene.

All of those, and especially the last, are exactly what they sound like. They don’t try for dialogue (the famous “plotsex” of many premium television offerings), but they do set mood and tone, and serve as moments of further character study. And, because this is TLBD, it is not a flattering picture.

Matthew McConaughey was once described by RiffTrax as “like [Patrick] Swayze -- you have to actively FORCE a shirt on him”, and I can’t say that this is an inaccurate description, particularly when it comes to Rust. He’s never strictly shirtless, per se, but his clothes seem to be intent on sneaking off him when he’s not wearing his sport coat and slacks in 1995.

Rust’s shirts are ruffled, ragged, mostly unbuttoned, sleeveless, rolled-up, tight, and sweaty. Pants are slim-cut -- and while Rust is undercover with the Iron Crusaders as Crash, and training for it, he is wearing leather pants and/or jeans he was poured into. While Marty’s wardrobe isn’t as slinky, he has a scene where he’s walking around Rust’s home in his underwear while Rust works out. Rust wears Marty’s shirt in the scene after that.

Blocking? There’s hands on chests, heads close together, shoulders touching, the embrace in the final scene…

And then there’s the dialogue.

The dialogue in TLBD would be a thing of beauty without the constant gay innuendos, but they certainly don’t hurt. The fact it is never, ever commented on, by any character, makes it all the better. There is no defense of the characters’ heterosexuality after a slight, no uncomfortable denial of something that might come off as faintly kind of homosexual if nobody said anything. But without the uncomfortable denials, or even acknowledgement, it resembles the media of the 1970’s, where the assumption was that open gayness was right around the corner. 

This all was unintentional on the part of the writers, and with the main cast of TLBD being craggy and depressing in non-tentacle cosmic horror, it could never be the slash goldmine the dialogue would suggest. At the time of this writing, AO3 has 939 True Detective fics and 30 on FFN, making it eligible for Yuletide. 

I thought that I could talk about Rust’s queerness separately from his mental state, but it seems that I cannot.

Like Pink Floyd's The Wall, The Long Bright Dark is a piece of media where I don't think you can analyze it without showing some of yourself in the process. And in my case, Rust is a particularly strong example.

Immediately, Rust is identified as antisocial to the Solar bodies he interacts with. From the perspective of his coworkers, Marty included, Rust holds himself apart because he considers himself "better than" rather than "separate from". Both are true in their own right, but this is a dance of manners common amongst a particular type of [person]. You can't comprehend what other people are talking about, and even if you could, your perspective is so alien that there is no point in trying to put in your thoughts, they're only going to get you in trouble. This is the song of the Lunar-Stellar path -- you will, at the last, always be alone. So revel in it!

 In the above paragraph, I have written "[person]", because I do not have a good word to describe the way Rust and I behave. It can be described as autistic, but also somewhere on the spectrum of schizophrenia. To call it mental illness detracts from how it nevertheless allows, and even augments, the ability of the person in question to lead a self-sufficient life. I’m going to go with the word “autist”, because I don’t have a better word, because it was Malcolm’s word, and I need to continue.

Many portrayals of autism focus hard on the presumed childlike nature of the people in question, and whether this is treated as good or bad depends on the story itself. Rust being an autist does not make his whole character, but it still touches everything he does. The fact we are not watching him, but taking him as a main POV character also helps, as there is only so far a POV character can be inscrutable. This often means that many writers take the coward’s way out and make the POV character in a story about autism/depression/schizospec someone intensely typical-minded who is dealing with a different character who is an autist. 

In 2012, Rust stims with a long-bladed work knife, in 1995, he is never without his sketchbook. 

In 2012, he bluntly states that he needs a six-pack of beer to continue the interview, “‘Cause it’s Thursday and it’s past noon. Thursday is one of my days off. On my off days, I start drinking at noon. You don’t get to interrupt that.” It’s not perfect logic, but to me, it makes very good sense. You have a schedule, and you keep to it. That’s a Rule, you don’t want to break it if you can help it. 

Around most people, Rust is jerky and uncomfortable, looking like he’d rather be anywhere else. His reaction to women, in particular, looks like a staticky dial-up noise in human form -- eye contact is difficult, because faces are hard, conversation is difficult to read if you don’t know the script, especially when you know you can never truly grasp what is necessary. Humans are hard to understand in the granular aspect, and what they value does not always make sense. All of this is queer in the sense of Queer Theory, to be a constant outsider to the society you are in, as well as the Lunar-Stellar path. 

In the course of writing this, I unfortunately found out that some very foolish people view Rust as a “Sigma Male” -- who “goes his own way”, but still “respects women”. Which is a view as uncomfortable as it is hilarious. Rust is able to make somewhat decent conversation (awkward, stilted conversation, equal parts blunt and shy), and doesn’t treat women as barely-sapient sex objects. That’s kind of like respect, in a particularly depressing sense. It’s better than the Good Ol’ Boys he has to work with (especially Marty) but that’s a low bar to clear. As for “going his own way"? Rust is “going his own way” because he’s aware that he’s a barely functioning mess of a human being in a cosmic horror story, Lunar-Stellar amongst the devouring Solar world. He goes his own way because there is nowhere else to go.

My birth card, in the RWS deck, is that of the Hermit. Rust, too, seems to live the life of a hermit in ways that speak to my own soul. What he defines as comfort is not to most people’s taste, but to me, it looks quite comfortable indeed. His 1995 home is a bed and books, a meditation space and a spare chest of his old life, everything neat and orderly to the point of antisepsis. It may be equal parts obsession and madness, but his own annihilation will be a very tidy one. 

In a social setting where queerness is unacceptable, a person who cannot present as anything but queer must find ways to fit around the requirements upon them. 

Marty has been able to hide his bisexuality by seeming to keep his jaunts to women, and plenty of them. Going by the second episode, his enjoyment of anal comes via fingering, rather than by seeking out men and jeopardizing his social status in a way that having extramarital heterosexual sex doesn’t. 

Rust, on the other hand, comes off as a gay man who, due to a variety of circumstances both internal and external, justifies his being disinterested in women as something that’s necessary, even noble. It’s for the good of the cosmos, really, for him to not be with women. He can’t justify bringing another child into this world -- not because his daughter died (which would be the reason in a more pandering show) but because humans need to stop reproducing.

The people who consider Rust to be exemplar of the "Sigma Male" also seem to have a worryingly positive view towards Maggie and Rust's relationship, particularly its endpoint. Their encounter and its aftermath could be viewed, if you squint, through the disturbing sexist lens of "well, she finally realized who the better man was out of the pair" or "well, she couldn't hold herself back from him, he's just that manly".
To my eye, it's one of the best portrayals of dubious consent that I've ever seen, right down to Rust's framing of it in 2012 as "she was driven to it, I don't blame her".

Comments

[haptalaon]

I hadn't considered Rust as an autistic character but that's a great read. It makes so much sense that his unusual politics/philosophy/life choices stem more from having lived a different kind of life, rather than - say - just being a badass (which isn't realistic).

[now I'm sort of musing on whether anyone has ever done a study of The Autistic Detective archetype - there's some portrayals of Sherlock Holmes (with the BBC one implying 'total asshole' is a diagnosis) and there's also Hannibal (Will Graham is canonically autistic but also has unreality experiences which make him scary/scared/potentially dangerous/extremely vulnerable, in ways which trouble the tendency of fiction to portray us as perma-children). It makes sense that the outsiderliness of being autistic is a popular trait for detective fiction, which usually features an outsider to a situation or someone who can see in different ways]

[goatgodschild]

I couldn't see him as anything but autistic after we get to see his home in 1995. The moment I saw it, I responded with this feeling of "oh, COMFY".